Chris Hedges's Blog, page 454

North Korea Said to Have Stolen a Fortune in Online Bank Heists

WASHINGTON — North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests have stopped, but its hacking operations to gather intelligence and raise funds for the sanction-strapped government in Pyongyang may be gathering steam.

U.S. security firm FireEye raised the alarm Wednesday over a North Korean group that it says has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars by infiltrating the computer systems of banks around the world since 2014 through highly sophisticated and destructive attacks that have spanned at least 11 countries. It says the group is still operating and poses “an active global threat.”

It is part of a wider pattern of malicious state-backed cyber activity that has led the Trump administration to identify North Korea — along with Russia, Iran and China — as one of the main online threats facing the United States. Last month, the Justice Department charged a North Korean hacker said to have conspired in devastating cyberattacks, including an $81 million heist of Bangladesh’s central bank and the WannaCry virus that crippled parts of Britain’s National Health Service.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned of the use of malware by Hidden Cobra, the U.S. government’s byword for North Korea hackers, in fraudulent ATM cash withdrawals from banks in Asia and Africa. It said that Hidden Cobra was behind the theft of tens of millions of dollars from teller machines in the past two years. In one incident this year, cash had been simultaneously withdrawn from ATMs in 23 different countries, it said.

North Korea, which prohibits access to the world wide web for virtually all its people, has previously denied involvement in cyberattacks, and attribution for such attacks is rarely made with absolute certainty. It is typically based on technical indicators such as the Internet Protocol addresses that identify computers and characteristics of the coding used in malware, which is the software a hacker may use to damage or disable computers.

But other cybersecurity experts tell The Associated Press that they also see continued signs that North Korea’s authoritarian government, which has a long track record of criminality to raise cash, is conducting malign activity online. That activity includes targeting of financial institutions and crypto-currency-related organizations, as well as spying on its adversaries, despite the easing of tensions between Pyongyang and Washington.

“The reality is they are starved for cash and are continuing to try and generate revenue, at least until sanctions are diminished,” said Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence at CrowdStrike. “At the same time, they won’t abate in intelligence collection operations, as they continue to negotiate and test the international community’s resolve and test what the boundaries are.”

CrowdStrike says it has detected continuing North Korean cyber intrusions in the past two months, including the use of a known malware against a potentially broad set of targets in South Korea, and a new variant of malware against users of mobile devices that use a Linux-based operating system.

This activity has been taking place against the backdrop of a dramatic diplomatic shift as Kim Jong Un has opened up to the world. He has held summits with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and with President Donald Trump, who hopes to persuade Kim to relinquish the nuclear weapons that pose a potential threat to the U.S. homeland. Tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula have dropped and fears of war with the U.S. have ebbed. Trump this weekend will dispatch his top diplomat, Mike Pompeo, to Pyongyang for the fourth time this year to make progress on denuclearization.

But North Korea has yet to take concrete steps to give up its nuclear arsenal, so there’s been no let-up in sanctions that have been imposed to deprive it of fuel and revenue for its weapons programs, and to block it from bulk cash transfers and accessing to the international banking system.

FireEye says APT38, the name it gives to the hacking group dedicated to bank theft, has emerged and stepped up its operations since February 2014 as the economic vise on North Korea has tightened in response to its nuclear and missile tests. Initial operations targeted financial institutions in Southeast Asia, where North Korea had experience in money laundering, but then expanded into other regions such as Latin America and Africa, and then extended to Europe and North America.

In all, FireEye says APT38 has attempted to steal $1.1 billion, and based on the data it can confirm, has gotten away with hundreds of millions in dollars. It has used malware to insert fraudulent transactions in the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication or SWIFT system that is used to transfer money between banks. Its biggest heist to date was $81 million stolen from the central bank of Bangladesh in February 2016. The funds were wired to bank accounts established with fake identities in the Philippines. After the funds were withdrawn they were suspected to have been laundered in casinos.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank, said in a report Wednesday that North Korea’s cyber capabilities provide an alternative means for challenging its adversaries. While Kim’s hereditary regime appears to prioritize currency generation, attacks using the SWIFT system raise concerns that North Korean hackers “may become more proficient at manipulating the data and systems that undergird the global financial system,” it says.

Sandra Joyce, FireEye’s head of global intelligence, said that while APT38 is a criminal operation, it leverages the skills and technology of a state-backed espionage campaign, allowing it to infiltrate multiple banks at once and figure how to extract funds. On average, it dwells in a bank’s computer network for 155 days to learn about its systems before it tries to steal anything. And when it finally pounces, it uses aggressive malware to wreak havoc and cover its tracks.

“We see this as a consistent effort, before, during and after any diplomatic efforts by the United States and the international community,” said Joyce, describing North Korea as being “undeterred” and urging the U.S. government to provide more specific threat information to financial institutions about APT38’s modus operandi. APT stands for Advanced Persistent Threat.

The Silicon Valley-based company says it is aware of continuing, suspected APT38 operations against other banks. The most recent attack it is publicly attributing to APT38 was against of Chile’s biggest commercial banks, Banco de Chile, in May this year. The bank has said a hacking operation robbed it of $10 million.

FireEye, which is staffed with a roster of former military and law-enforcement cyberexperts, conducted malware analysis for a criminal indictment by the Justice Department last month against Park Jin Hyok, the first time a hacker said to be from North Korea has faced U.S. criminal charges. He’s accused of conspiring in a number of devastating cyberattacks: the Bangladesh heist and other attempts to steal more than $1 billion from financial institutions around the world; the 2014 breach of Sony Pictures Entertainment; and the WannaCry ransomware virus that in 2017 infected computers in 150 countries.

Four Arrested for Inciting Violence at 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ Rally

Federal prosecutors on Tuesday announced they had arrested four members or associates of the Rise Above Movement, a white supremacist group, over their alleged role in the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The four men were charged with having traveled to Charlottesville with the aim of inciting a riot and conspiracy to incite a riot, and prosecutors submitted an array of photographs and videos capturing the men pummeling and choking protesters over two days.

If convicted, the men — Benjamin Drake Daley, 25, of Redondo Beach, California; Thomas Walter Gillen, 34, of Redondo Beach; Michael Paul Miselis, 29, of Lawndale, California; and Cole Evan White, 24, of Clayton, California — could face five years in prison for each of two federal riot charges. White has been described as an associate of the group, not a member.

Most of the men charged on Tuesday have been the subject of reporting by ProPublica and Frontline over the last year. RAM, based in Southern California, claimed more than 50 members in 2017 and an overriding purpose: physically attacking its ideological foes. Its members spend weekends training in boxing and other martial arts, and they have boasted publicly of their violence during rallies — not just in Charlottesville, but in the California cities of Huntington Beach, San Bernardino and Berkeley, as well. Many of the altercations have been captured on video.

The charges announced Tuesday are among a number of prosecutions to stem from the notorious Charlottesville gathering that resulted in two days of mayhem and the death of a young anti-racism activist. The charges brought today are unrelated to the death.

Local prosecutors have also brought charges against a handful of other participants in the Charlottesville rally, successfully convicting several men, including activists on both sides of the clashes. And federal authorities have indicted neo-Nazi James Alex Fields, the man accused of killing counterprotester Heather Heyer and injuring more than two dozen others, on some 30 charges, including 28 counts of hate crime.

“This case should serve as another example of the Department of Justice’s commitment to protecting the life, liberty and civil rights of all our citizens,” U.S. Attorney Thomas T. Cullen said Tuesday. “Any individual who has or plans to travel to this district with the intent to engage in acts of violence will be prosecuted and held accountable for those actions.”

Cullen cited ProPublica and Frontline’s reporting during a news conference Tuesday.

“The news organization ProPublica did in my view a fantastic job in piecing together some of the organized activities that occurred on Aug. 11 and Aug. 12, and the work that they did was certainly reviewed by our office as a starting point to understand a little bit about this particular group,” he said.

One of those arrested, Miselis, was a doctoral student at UCLA with a U.S. government security clearance to work on sensitive research for a prominent defense contractor. He was let go by the contractor, Northrop Grumman, after ProPublica and Frontline identified him as a RAM member who had attacked people in Charlottesville. At the time, Miselis denied involvement in the violent weekend two summers ago.

RAM was founded in early 2017 by Robert Rundo, a Queens, New York, native who served an 18-month prison sentence for stabbing a rival gang member six times during a 2009 street fight. The group’s core membership is small — 15 to 20 young men, according to interviews and a review of court records. Before joining RAM, several members spent time in jail or state prison on serious felony charges including assault, robbery, and gun and knife offenses. Daley served seven days in jail for carrying a concealed snub-nosed revolver. Another RAM member served a prison term for stabbing a Latino man five times in a 2009 gang assault.

A RAM recruiting video posted to YouTube and Vimeo highlights the organization’s heavy emphasis on violence, cutting between choppy footage of RAM members brawling at public events and carefully shot scenes of them sharpening their boxing skills and doing push-ups during group workout sessions.

RAM members are frequently praised as heroes on some white supremacist media outlets

The group portrays itself as a defense force for a white Western civilization under assault by Jews, Muslims and brown-skinned immigrants from south of the Rio Grande. At rallies, members have waved red-and-white crusader flags and carried signs saying “Rapefugees Not Welcome” and “Da Goyim Know,” an anti-Semitic slogan meant to highlight a supposed conspiracy by Jews to control the globe and subjugate non-Jews. One RAM banner, which depicts knights on horseback chasing after Muslims, reads “Islamists Out!”

ProPublica interviewed one RAM leader last year on the condition of anonymity. He said the gang came together organically. It started when he encountered a few other guys with similar political beliefs, including two active-duty U.S. Marines, while exercising at different gyms in Southern California. They all liked President Donald Trump but didn’t think his agenda went far enough.

On social media channels, RAM members regularly espouse blatantly anti-Semitic and racist views. They have repeatedly been booted from Instagram and Twitter for offensive postings.

Identifying Members of RAM
Lucas Waldron/ProPublica

This year, four RAM members attended a massive neo-Nazi rally in Germany, which was held on Hitler’s birthday, uploading photos and videos from the trip to social media.

A criminal complaint filed in federal court Tuesday cited the group’s racist and anti-Semitic postings online in support of the arrests.

Prosecutors said the four men will be brought to Virginia next week to be arraigned on the charges.

It was not clear on Tuesday whether the men had yet retained lawyers.

“This wasn’t in our view the lawful exercise of First Amendment rights,” Cullen said. “These guys came to Charlottesville to commit violent acts, and this wasn’t the first time they’ve done it.”

Cullen said that charging the men with inciting a riot and conspiracy to incite a riot was more appropriate and likely effective than arresting them on hate crime charges.

Cullen said there are other ongoing investigations, but he would not say more about them.

There’s a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office who has done nothing else but look into these investigations since Aug. 12, according to Cullen.

“We’re not finished,” Cullen said. “We’re going to continue these investigations until we reach a point where we’re satisfied that our federal interests have been vindicated.”

Kavanaugh’s ‘Revenge’ Theory Hints at Troubling Past With Clintons

To some, Brett Kavanaugh is clearing his name. To others, he’s veering into conspiracy theory.

But in blaming “revenge on behalf of the Clintons” for the sexual misconduct allegations against him, the Supreme Court nominee is drawing new attention to his time on the Kenneth Starr team investigating Bill Clinton. And in doing so, he’s shown he can deliver a Trump-like broadside against detractors even if it casts him in a potentially partisan light.

As a young lawyer, Kavanaugh played a key role on Starr’s team investigating sexual misconduct by then-President Bill Clinton, helping to shape one of the most salacious chapters in modern political history.

Kavanaugh spent a good part of the mid-1990s jetting back and forth to Little Rock, Arkansas, digging into the Clintons’ background, according to documents that were made public as part of his nomination to the Supreme Court.

It was Kavanaugh who pushed Starr to ask Clinton, in graphic detail, about the nature of his sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. In a memo from 1998, Kavanaugh wrote that Starr should ask Clinton whether he engaged in phone sex and specific sexual acts with her.

Starr took Kavanaugh’s advice. His resulting report ultimately presented evidence that Clinton, in denying the affair, lied under oath. The report became the grounds for Clinton’s impeachment.

Now it’s Kavanaugh who is facing sexual misconduct allegations, including from Christine Blasey Ford, who said he groped her at a party when they were teens and tried to remove her clothes. And it’s Kavanaugh who was pushed to speak publicly in personal, painful detail.

In his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh forcefully denied ever sexually assaulting Ford or anyone else. In an emotional statement, he put the blame for the accusations against him partly on the Clintons.

“This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit,” Kavanaugh testified. The 53-year-old said it was being fueled by “pent-up anger” over President Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory and outside groups stoking fear about his judicial record. He also said it was revenge on behalf of the Clintons.

The “revenge” line has reverberated this week as senators await the results of an FBI background check investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against Kavanaugh. Democrats have called the comment a breathtaking breach of judicial impartiality that should be disqualifying on its own, while Republicans have defended the tenor of his remarks, saying he had every right to be upset. GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah calls it “righteous anger.”

Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, who was in Congress during Clinton’s impeachment, acknowledged Tuesday that Kavanaugh’s “lock-her-up grace note may be appealing to some.” But, he said, “it speaks volumes about this judge and how he would serve.”

At an event Tuesday, Hillary Clinton scoffed, “Boy, I’ll tell you, they give us a lot of credit.”

Clinton tried to run the logic of Kavanaugh’s claim during an event hosted by The Atlantic. “It would’ve had to have happened 36 years ago,” she said, “and that seems a stretch, even for the vast right-wing conspiracy stories about me.”

At last week’s hearing, Democratic senators on the dais were stunned.

“Is it your testimony — that the motivation of the courageous woman who sat where you did just a short time ago was revenge on behalf of a left-wing conspiracy or the Clintons?” asked Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.

Others welcomed Kavanaugh taking a page from the playbook of the man who nominated him, President Donald Trump.

It wasn’t quite a “Lock her up!” Trump rally cry, but Kavanaugh’s allies appreciated a hard-hitting defense of his own name and character that name-checked the Clintons. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. backed him up.

“Would you say you’ve been through hell?” Graham asked the judge.

“I’ve been through hell and then some,” Kavanaugh testified.

While Kavanaugh’s role in the Starr investigation is a part of the appellate court judge’s resume that may have received short shrift during days of confirmation hearings, plenty of players from that era remain central to today’s confirmation fight.

Graham had been a chief House prosecutor during Clinton’s impeachment trial. Other senators on the dais straddle both eras. Clinton has been making media rounds. Starr has recently published a new book about his experience.

A former top aide to Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Brian Fallon, leads the outside group Demand Justice that Kavanaugh was likely referring to in his outburst. Fallon said Tuesday that Kavanaugh’s “unhinged, partisan rant last week is just another reason he is not fit for a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court.”

Democrats had tried to portray Kavanaugh as a partisan warrior from the moment he was nominated, but failed to gain much traction with it. But the Clintons’ revenge theory revealed a different side of Kavanaugh that won’t be forgotten if he makes it to the high court.

Julian Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton University, said Kavanaugh “has been fighting the Republican war since the 1990s.”

“He revealed a great deal about who he is and what drives him,” he said.

Bombshell Report Exposes Decades of Trump Tax Evasion

This is a developing story and may be updated.

Undermining the narrative President Donald Trump has aggressively promoted of his success as a “self-made” billionaire—the platform upon which he has built his success as a business mogul as well as his campaign for president in 2016—the New York Times released an explosive in-depth report on Tuesday detailing schemes which allowed Trump to avoid paying taxes on wealth that was transferred from his parents to himself and his siblings.

The “dubious tax schemes” Trump helped coordinate include cases of “outright fraud,” according to the Times.

Trump has for years been fond of telling audiences that through hard work and financial know-how he was able to transform a single $1 million loan from his father, Fred Trump, into a $10 billion fortune—a tale that made him a popular figure with those who voted for him in 2016.

But the Times reveals that based on 100,000 pages of financial records—including 200 pages of Fred Trump’s tax returns and those of the Trump empire’s partnerships—and interviews with Fred Trump’s former associates, Trump has received the equivalent of $413 million in 2018 dollars from his father’s real estate empire—starting “when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.”

Contrary to Trump’s preferred origin story, the Times revealed that Fred Trump lent his son at least $60.7 million to help him fund his business ventures—equivalent to $140 million in today’s dollars. While Trump has claimed he had to pay the initial loan back “with interest,” tax returns show most of the money was not repaid.

There you have it: Donald Trump is no self-made man, he was a millionaire at age 8 and only survived on his Daddy’s money. The Trump family grew richer by tax fraud. This is a profile of a world-class criminal family. #CriminalTrump https://t.co/o0qYjiLNNZ

— Carl Dunn (@CarlDunnJr) October 2, 2018

By setting up a fraudulent corporation through which Trump and his four siblings passed huge monetary gifts from their parents, they were able to avoid paying millions of dollars in taxes—just one of several tax schemes Trump helped orchestrate in order to enrich himself, as the Times reports:

Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

Trump’s parents transferred over $1 billion in wealth to their five children—a sum which should have left the family with a $550 million tax bill. But the Trumps paid just $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, rather than 55 percent under the tax code at the time.


The Times’ reporting also suggests that Fred Trump came to his son’s financial rescue numerous times as the president’s businesses floundered. He withdrew nearly $50 million from his real estate empire in 1990 when Trump’s hotels and casinos were “drowning in debt”—indicating that Fred “wanted plenty of cash on hand to bail out his son if need be.”

Fred also arranged a purchase of $3.35 million in casino chips from Trump’s Castle casino in Atlantic City that same year, to keep his son from defaulting on a bond repayment.

“The Times‘s investigation of the Trump family’s finances is unprecedented in scope and precision, offering the first comprehensive look at the inherited fortune and tax dodges that guaranteed Donald J. Trump a gilded life,” wrote David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner, the journalists behind the story. “The reporting makes clear that in every era of Mr. Trump’s life, his finances were deeply intertwined with, and dependent on, his father’s wealth.”

If this @nytimes bombshell is accurate, Trump isn’t a self made millionaire. He engaged in massive tax fraud to inflate his inherited wealth. Like most everything else he says, his “self made” story is a huge lie. Obama was right. Trump is a BS artist – now enabled by Republicans

— Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) October 2, 2018

Americans should know if the president is a tax fraud. @realDonaldTrump should come clean and immediately release his tax returns OR the Republican-led Congress should come back from its 6-week recess and vote to release them. https://t.co/Uwaw7uzUnn

— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) October 2, 2018

Do you know how high the bar is for the NYT to directly accuse someone, let alone a sitting president, of tax fraud, which is a federal crime? It’s very, very high. And here we are: https://t.co/WyDfI56LIo

— Binyamin Appelbaum (@BCAppelbaum) October 2, 2018

The President is a financial fraud, made none of his own money, was consistently bailed out by his dad, and conspired with his siblings (one of whom is a federal judge) to engage in (possibly criminal) tax fraud to inherit their wealth. https://t.co/oC0pxuepBb

— Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) October 2, 2018

Truck Hits ‘Fight for 15’ Protesters in Flint

Multiple people in Flint, Mich., were hurt Tuesday after a truck hit people protesting for workers’ rights. Thousands gathered in Flint and Detroit to argue for the right to strike and for a $15 hourly minimum wage for all workers, particularly those in the fast-food industry.

Protesters began walking down Flint’s Dort Highway around 7 a.m., chanting, “We work, we sweat, but $15 on our checks” and “No justice, no peace.” Some carried signs that said, “November 6th VOTE” and wore T-shirts advocating for a $15-an-hour minimum wage.

The burgundy Chevrolet truck drove into the tail end of the crowd only minutes after the march began. In video from one of the protesters, you can hear a car honk, followed by the sound of people screaming, followed by a tire screech.

Michigan State Police Sgt. Duane Zook said nine people were hurt in the incident. Seven were sent to Hurley Medical Center, and none had life-threatening injuries, according to a report from the hospital. Police say the truck driver is not in custody.

Michigan Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gretchen Whitmer, who attended the protest, expressed her sympathy:

I was in Flint for the rally this morning and am incredibly sad that so many people were hurt. https://t.co/4gtoYMP7NO

— Gretchen Whitmer (@gretchenwhitmer) October 2, 2018

BREAKING: Our photographer saw multiple people get hit by a car at the Flint #FightFor15 rally — at least four people taken by ambulance. Democratic candidate for Governor @GretchenWhitmer was set to attend this rally with hundreds fighting for $15 an hour fast food wages. pic.twitter.com/wxMunDI4jq

— Rachelle Spence (@RSpenceTV) October 2, 2018

“We are losing patience with an economy that continues to leave us out,” said Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Mary Kay Henry.

Similar protests, organized by the SEIU’s Fight for 15 movement, are planned for Wednesday in Milwaukee and Thursday in Chicago. Activists will also focus on canvassing in Florida, Illinois and Pennsylvania.

“This election we are standing together to hold elected leaders accountable for our right to unite in unions for higher pay, affordable health care and a better future for our families,” Henry said.

Could Trump Take Down the American Empire?

More than any other presidency in modern history, Donald Trump’s has been a veritable sociopolitical wrecking ball, deliberately stoking conflict by playing to xenophobic and racist currents in American society and debasing its political discourse. That fact has been widely discussed. But Trump’s attacks on the system of the global U.S. military presence and commitments have gotten far less notice.

He has complained bitterly, both in public and in private meetings with aides, about the suite of permanent wars that the Pentagon has been fighting for many years across the Greater Middle East and Africa, as well as about deployments and commitments to South Korea and NATO. This has resulted in an unprecedented struggle between a sitting president and the national security state over a global U.S. military empire that has been sacrosanct in American politics since early in the Cold War.

And now Bob Woodward’s “Fear: Trump in the White House” has provided dramatic new details about that struggle.

Trump’s Advisers Take Him Into ‘the Tank’

Trump had entered the White House with a clear commitment to ending U.S. military interventions, based on a worldview in which fighting wars in the pursuit of military dominance has no place. In the last speech of his “victory tour” in December 2016, Trump vowed, “We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we knew nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with.” Instead of investing in wars, he said, he would invest in rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure.

In a meeting with his national security team in the summer of 2017, in which Secretary of Defense James Mattis recommended new military measures against Islamic State affiliates in North Africa, Trump expressed his frustration with the unending wars. “You guys want me to send troops everywhere,” Trump said, according to a Washington Post report. “What’s the justification?”

Mattis replied, “Sir, we’re doing it to prevent a bomb from going off in Times Square,” to which Trump angrily retorted that the same argument could be made about virtually any country on the planet.

Trump had even given ambassadors the power to call a temporary halt to drone strikes, according to the Post story, causing further consternation at the Pentagon.

Trump’s national security team became so alarmed about his questioning of U.S. military engagements and forward deployment of troops that they felt something had to be done to turn him around. Mattis proposed to take Trump away from the White House into “the Tank” at the Pentagon, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff held their meetings, hoping to drive home their arguments more effectively.

It was there, on July 20, 2017, that Mattis, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and other senior officials sought to impress on Trump the vital importance of maintaining existing U.S. worldwide military commitments and deployments. Mattis used the standard Bush and Obama administration rhetoric of globalism, according to the meeting notes provided to Woodward. He asserted that the “rules-based, international democratic order”—the term used to describe the global structure of U.S. military and military power—had brought security and prosperity. Tillerson, ignoring decades of U.S. destabilizing wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, chimed in, saying, “This is what has kept the peace for 70 years.”

Trump said nothing, according to Woodward’s account, but simply shook his head in disagreement. He eventually steered the discussion to an issue that was particularly irritating to him: U.S. military and economic relations with South Korea. “We spend $3.5 billion a year to have troops in South Korea,” Trump complained. “I don’t know why they’re there. … Let’s bring them all home!”

At that, Trump’s chief of staff at the time, Reince Priebus, recognizing that the national security team’s effort to get control of Trump’s opposition to their wars and troop deployments had been an utter failure, called a halt to the meeting.

In September 2017, even as Trump threatened in tweets to destroy North Korea, he was privately hammering aides over the U.S. troop presence in South Korea and repeatedly expressing a determination to remove them, Woodward’s account reveals.

Those Trump complaints prompted H.R. McMaster, then the national security adviser, to call for a National Security Council meeting on the issue on Jan. 19. Trump again demanded, “What do we get by maintaining a massive military presence in the Korean peninsula?” And he linked that question to the broader issue of the United States paying for the defense of other states in Asia, the Middle East and NATO.

Mattis portrayed the troop presence in South Korea as a great security bargain. “Forward-positioned troops provide the least costly means of achieving our security objectives,” he said, “and withdrawal would lead our allies to lose all confidence in us.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, argued that South Korea was reimbursing the United States $800 million a year out of the total cost of $2 billion, thus subsidizing the United States for something it would do in its own interests anyway.

But such arguments made no impression on Trump, who saw no value in having troops abroad at a time when the United States itself was crumbling. “We have [spent] $7 trillion in the Middle East,” Trump said at the end of the meeting. “We can’t even muster $1 trillion for domestic infrastructure.”

Trump’s belief that U.S. troops should be pulled out of South Korea was reinforced by the unexpected political-diplomatic developments in North and South Korea in early 2018. Trump responded positively to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s offer of a summit meeting and signaled his readiness to negotiate with Kim on an agreement that would both denuclearize North Korea and bring peace to the Korean peninsula.

Before the Singapore summit with Kim, Trump ordered the Pentagon to develop options for drawing down those U.S. troops. That idea was viewed by the news media and most of the national security elite as completely unacceptable, but it has long been well known among military and intelligence specialists on Korea that U.S. troops are not needed—either to deter North Korea or to defend against an attack across the DMZ.

Trump’s willingness to practice personal diplomacy with Kim and to envision the end or serious attenuation of the U.S. troop deployment in South Korea was undoubtedly driven in part by his ego, but it could not have happened without his rejection of the ideology of national security that had dominated Washington elites for generations.

Fights Over Syria and Afghanistan

Trump was impatient to end all three major wars he had inherited from Barack Obama: Afghanistan and the wars against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Woodward recounts how Trump lectured McMaster, Porter, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in July 2017 on their return from a golf weekend about how tired he was of those wars. “We should just declare victory, end the wars and bring our troops home,” he told them, repeating—probably unconsciously—the same political tactic that had been urged by Vermont Sen. George Aiken in 1966 for ending the U.S. war in Vietnam.

Even after a massively destructive U.S.-NATO bombing campaign forced Islamic State to abandon its capital in the city of Raqqa, Syria, in October 2017, Trump’s national security team insisted on keeping U.S. troops in Syria indefinitely. In a mid-November briefing for reporters at the Pentagon, Mattis declared that preventing the return of Islamic State was a “longer-term objective” of the U.S. military, and that U.S. forces would remain in Syria to help establish conditions for a diplomatic solution. “We’re not going to walk away before the Geneva process has traction,” Mattis said.

But Mattis and Tillerson had not changed Trump’s mind about Syria. In early April 2018, the Pentagon gave Trump a paper that focused almost entirely on different options for remaining in Syria, treating full withdrawal as a clearly unacceptable option. In a tense meeting, Mattis and Joint Chiefs Chairman Dunford warned that complete withdrawal would allow Iran and Russia to fill the vacuum—as though Trump shared their assumption that such an outcome was unthinkable. Instead Trump told them he wanted U.S. troops to wrap the war with Islamic State in six months, according to a CNN account from Pentagon sources. And when Mattis and other officials warned that the timeline was too short, “Trump responded by telling his team to just get it done.”

A few days later, Trump declared publicly, “We’re coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now. Very soon we’re coming out.”

After John Bolton entered the White House as national security adviser in April, however, he persuaded Trump to view Syria in the context of the administration’s vendetta against Iran—at least for the time being. Bolton declared this week that U.S. troops would not leave Syria as long as Iranian troops serve outside Iranian borders. But Mattis contradicted Bolton, saying the troops remained in Syria to defeat Islamic State and that the commitment was “not open-ended.”

Trump had been calling for an end to the war in Afghanistan for years before his election, and he felt passionate about getting out. And Woodward reveals that the NSC’s chief of staff, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, supported the idea of U.S. withdrawal. When the National Security Council met in July 2017 to discuss Afghanistan, Trump interrupted McMaster’s initial presentation to explained why the war was “a disaster”: Nonexistent “ghost soldiers” in the Afghan army were being used to rip off the United States, as corrupt Afghan leaders milked the war and U.S. assistance to make money. When Tillerson tried to place Afghanistan in a “regional context,” Trump responded, “But how many more deaths? How many more lost limbs? How much longer are we going to be there?”

The Pentagon and McMaster nevertheless pressed on with a plan to increase the U.S. military presence. At a climactic meeting in mid-August on Afghanistan, according to the account in Woodward’s book, McMaster told Trump he had no choice but to step up the war by adding 4,000 troops. The reason? It was necessary to prevent al-Qaida or Islamic State from using Afghan territory to launch terror attacks on the United States or Europe.

Trump retorted angrily that the generals were “the architects of this mess” and that they have were “making it worse,” by asking him to add more troops to “something I don’t believe in.” Then Trump folded his arms and declared, “I want to get out. And you’re telling me the answer is to get deeper in.”

Mattis spelled out the argument in terms that he hoped would finally get to Trump. He warned that what had happened to Obama when he withdrew forces from Iraq prematurely would happen to Trump if he didn’t go along with the Pentagon’s proposed new strategy.

“I still think you’re wrong” [about the war], Trump said, [it] “hasn’t gotten us anything.” But he went along with Mattis and announced that he had been convinced to go against his own “instincts” by approving the 4,000-troop increase.

He was being cowed by the same fear of being accused of responsibility for possible future consequences of defeat in a war—a fear that had led Lyndon Johnson to abandon his own strong resistance to a full-scale U.S. intervention in Vietnam in mid-1965 and Barack Obama to accept a major escalation in Afghanistan that he had argued against in White House meetings.

Trump announced a new strategy in which there would be no arbitrary timelines for withdrawal as there had been under Obama and no restrictions on commanders’ use of drones and conventional airstrikes. But since then, all accounts have agreed that the war is being lost to the Taliban, and Trump will certainly be forced to revisit the policy as the evidence of failure creates new political pressures on the administration. 

Trump’s economic worldview, which some have called mercantilist, poses economic dangers to the United States. And given Trump’s multiple serious personal and political failings—including his adoption of a policy of regime change in Iran urged on him by Bolton and by Trump’s extremist Zionist campaign donor Sheldon Adelson—he may finally give up his resistance to the multiple permanent U.S. wars.

But Trump’s unorthodox approach has already emboldened him to challenge the essential logic of the U.S. military empire more than any previous president. And the final years of his administration will certainly bring further struggles over the issues on which he has jousted repeatedly with those in charge of the empire.

Some Blacks See a Racial Double Standard in Kavanaugh Case

Marcus Dixon was sentenced to 10 years behind bars in Georgia for having sex with an underage white girl when he was 18. Dayonn Davis, another black youth, got a five-year prison sentence for stealing a $100 pair of shoes at gunpoint when he was 15.

It’s cases like those that minorities and others point to with frustration when they hear some of Brett Kavanaugh’s defenders say the sexual assault and underage-drinking accusations against the Supreme Court nominee fall under the category of “Boys will be boys.”

Some see a racial double standard at work, complaining that when young blacks get into trouble, their actions rarely are viewed as youthful folly in the way that the misdeeds of privileged whites are.

“I think there is a very distinct difference between the benefit of the doubt that is extended to black males and to white males,” said Jarvis DeBerry, columnist and deputy opinion editor of NOLA.com/Times Picayune.

Studies show young blacks are often perceived as older and less innocent than whites their age, a phenomenon some say translates all too often into African-American youths being demonized as “thugs,” arrested, incarcerated and sometimes killed.

Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, says a drunken Kavanaugh held her down, tried to take off her clothes and covered her mouth to muffle her screams when they were high school students in the 1980s. Kavanaugh has forcefully denied doing any such thing to anyone, and many supporters say they believe him.

Others have suggested that if it did happen, he might deserve a pass.

“Let’s say he did this exactly as she said. Should the fact that a 17-year-old, presumably very drunk kid did this, should this be disqualifying? That’s the question at the end of the day, isn’t it?” Bari Weiss, a New York Times opinion editor, said on MSNBC.

Minnesota state Sen. Scott Newman tweeted: “Even if true, teenagers!”

Some black commentators and others have recoiled at that line of argument, pointing to the killings of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was shot by a white Cleveland police officer in 2014 while carrying what turned out to be a pellet gun; Michael Brown, the unarmed 18-year-old whose shooting by police that same year touched off violence in Ferguson, Missouri; and 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was gunned down in 2012 by a neighborhood watch volunteer while carrying iced tea and a bag of Skittles.

“The right wants Brett Kavanaugh to get another chance because, hey, he was just a teenager, but they also believe teenagers like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown got what they deserved,” author and critic Toure tweeted.

Opel Jones, a black Democrat running for the Howard County Council in Maryland, said that in the case of Martin, “you have the issue of the perception that this young man, he’s an adult, he’s bigger, he’s stronger, he’s such a savage, a beast, all the things that young black men especially get.”

“Wherein the public, some are excusing Brett Kavanaugh as ’Oh, he’s young, he’s white, he was just having fun,’” Jones said. “I don’t want to use the term racist, but they kind of are.”

Dixon was accused by a 15-year-old classmate of raping her in 2003. Dixon’s attorneys argued that the sex was consensual and that the underage girl fabricated the rape story to avoid getting in trouble with her father. A jury acquitted him of rape but found him guilty of statutory rape and aggravated child molestation.

Dixon spent 15 months behind bars in Georgia before his 10-year sentence was thrown out.

As for Davis, the teenager sentenced in June for stealing a pair of Nikes in Georgia while an accomplice pulled a gun, he was prosecuted as an adult, even though his lawyer said he had no prior record.

Black boys as young as 10 are more likely to be mistaken as older, be perceived as guilty and face police violence if accused of a crime, according to an American Psychological Association report in 2014.

Adults likewise think that black girls are less innocent, are less in need of protection and nurturing, and seem older than white girls, according to a 2017 report from the Center on Poverty and Inequality at the Georgetown University Law Center.

Eileen M. Ahlen, assistant professor of criminal justice at Penn State University at Harrisburg, said it is not just young people who are treated differently.

Ahlen said research shows that there is disparate treatment at all stages of the justice system — who’s stopped, who’s arrested, who gets bail, who gets prosecuted, severity of sentence, who gets parole — with whites able to exit the criminal justice system earlier and with less impact than minorities.

Even when accounting for similar crimes, “generally, all else being equal, a person of color is going to receive a harsher sentence,” she said.

The Homeless and the Indigent Are People, Too

When actor-writer Robert Galinsky moved to New York City as a young man from Hartford, Conn., he lived in a rent-controlled apartment in the East Village. Recognizing he would not have to work himself to exhaustion every month to make rent, he decided to dedicate his time to helping the underprivileged, volunteering locally at Trinity Homeless Services and at The Stella for the formerly homeless in Spanish Harlem.

He eventually wound up teaching literature to the incarcerated on Riker’s Island after meeting former Black Panther Jamal Joseph, who founded the youth-oriented IMPACT Repertory Theatre in Harlem. And it is this experience that serves as the inspiration for his one-man production, “The Bench,” which makes its debut this week at Hollywood’s Hudson Guild Theater.

“I tuned in and heard their beautiful vulgar poetry and also learned that they weren’t just aliens and ghosts and zombies with no roots,” Galinsky tells Truthdig. “They were people who had roots right there on those benches, had communities and had mores and their own little culture. And it just blew my mind. They were dealing with the same emotional issues of people who had homes, people who had families and structures behind them.”

Set in the late 1980s amid the AIDS epidemic, the play stars Galinsky as five different characters, sometimes interacting with one another, other times decrying their fate to whoever will listen. Produced by of “Sex & the City” fame and directed by Jay O. Sanders, it ran for roughly 30 weeks off-Broadway in 2017 at the Cherry Lane Theater and the East Village Playhouse to glowing reviews. The play’s new venue coincides with Galinsky’s own move to L.A., where he’s shopping his concept to TV producers when he’s not volunteering at the Downtown Women’s Center.

“Interacting on benches late at night under sometimes risky conditions, shitty weather, I became friends with these guys. One of them actually asked me if I wanted to borrow two bucks,” he says of his experience in writing “The Bench,” which included workshopping the play in front of his students on Riker’s Island.

On two separate occasions, Galinsky found himself in a fistfight. An especially close call came early on when he was discovered recording some of the inmates as part of his research. “You a cop?!” one of them yelled in his face, while Galinsky attempted to explain himself.

“You’re investigating how we do what we do, and you want to tell people?!”

“Yeah,” he replied.

“OK, fine,” was the response. He was left alone after that.

Jamal Joseph, Galinsky’s mentor and a member of the Panther 21, had a similar experience when he was arrested, accused of plotting bomb and long-range rifle attacks on New York City police in a case that later collapsed. Just a teen at the time, he served six years in Leavenworth, where he earned two college degrees in the 1960s. Joseph also wrote a play for Black History Month, and was startled to see numerous Latino prisoners turn up to watch his all-black cast rehearse.

“Your first reaction is, man, who they mad at?” recalls Joseph, a 2008 Best Song Oscar nominee for his work on the documentary “Raise Up: The World Is Our Gym” (2017). “These brothers don’t usually leave their area of the yard unless they have a beef with somebody. Finally, after about 10 or 15 minutes, one of the guys came over to me and was, like, yo brother, I don’t mean to get in your business, but that guy you’re working with, I’m not feeling his character, homes. And I was like, why don’t you do it? And he was great, and he made his friend get in. So, I went back and I added some Latino characters. And then some of the white brothers got nervous, and they were like ‘a couple of times week these black dudes and Latino dudes sneak off someplace, let’s see what’s up.’ Then some of them jumped in.”

Joseph watched as the men responded to each other in a way he hadn’t seen before, leading to a drop in gang violence at the prison. The experience awoke in him the power of art to heal and unite, eventually leading to his co-founding IMPACT Theatre, where he helps at-risk youths transform themselves and their communities.

“Our country has never been truly about growing up to be social changemakers, or seek justice for people,” says Galinsky. “Our country has always been about seeking a lawn and picket fence and property, so we can stay safe. And I think with all of the sharing all over the globe, it’s become more fashionable, more acceptable to take on the role of sharing responsibilities for our earth and our relationships.”

A demographic shift among young people bears his thesis out, as recent polling finds 55 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 prefer socialism to capitalism. Joseph points to a few groups throughout our nation’s history who saw their protests blossom into social movements—abolition, the end of child labor, opposition to the Vietnam War and the push for civil and LGBTQ rights.

“Ten years ago, people would say young people are complacent, they don’t get it,” he observes. “We have a real generation of young activists now who are sophisticated, who are smart, who understand that the problems are systemic. Sometimes people come to an awareness thinking it’s one bad cop or one racist store owner. Then you begin to hang out with other young people and they begin showing you how police brutality and racism and classism are institutionalized, and we have to fight those institutions.”

At Riker’s Island, Galinsky is battling a system he believes is set up to maintain or increase recidivism in order to feed the prison industrial complex. The odds are simply not in former inmates’ favor. While writing “The Bench,” Galinsky wrestled with how best to awaken the public to this crisis, which is why he wants to take his show to television.

“Here’s a man who genuinely loves people, people from all backgrounds, incarcerated folks, formerly incarcerated folks, and homeless folks,” offers Joseph. “It shows up in everything he does and especially in this amazing piece, ‘The Bench.’ “

Unlike most New Yorkers, who have learned to block out the people they see sleeping on benches, Joseph and his colleagues at IMPACT often stop and introduce themselves, exchanging a few words and even buying their new acquaintances a sandwich if they think a few dollars might go toward drugs or alcohol instead. What he and Galinsky have learned is that human interaction can often go a long way toward healing.

“This is something I’ve been dealing with and doing my entire life,” says Galinsky. “Sometimes eye contact is better than a piece of bread or a dollar bill.”

Private Prisons Rake In Millions Detaining Immigrants

Private for-profit prisons are a roughly $4 billion industry in America. When Thomas Beasley first started what became CoreCivic, one of the two largest private prison corporations (the other is GEO Group) in the 1980s, America was running out of space in federally owned prisons. Beasley says he was just filling a hole in the market, telling an interviewer, “You just sell it like you were selling cars or real estate or hamburgers.”

As The New York Times notes in its Retro Report series—which explores the effects of political and business trends—such prisons “are where the government sends most people caught trying to enter the United States illegally.”

The documentary video in this week’s Retro Report explores how these immigrant prisoners are treated. As the Times explains, “One picture of private prisons captured in the video includes barely edible food, indifferent health care, guard brutality and assorted corner-cutting measures.”

Josue Vladimir Cortez Diaz, a gay immigrant from El Salvador, is a key character in the documentary. He says he came to America to escape persecution and death threats. He was captured at the border in California and sent to a GEO Group prison there.

He was later released, but, as the Times reports, “not before he and other detainees staged a hunger strike to protest their treatment at [the facility in Adelanto, Calif.]. Prison guards beat and pepper-sprayed them, they say, and they are now suing GEO and federal and local authorities for what they say were rights violations.”

In the documentary, he explains that “the conditions in the detention center, they’re bad, right down to the food. … They don’t care if someone is sick, if the food goes bad. That’s how we came to say we have to protest.”

GEO Group spokesman Pablo Paez called Cortez Diaz’s statements “completely baseless,” adding that federal authorities “found that the officers acted in accordance with established protocol.”

Private prison corporations may house only 9 percent of the nation’s total prison population, but they are in charge of a much larger portion of immigrant detainees—“73 percent by some accounts,” the Times reports. Alonzo Peña, a former deputy director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, says that ICE is at least partly to blame:

”We set up this partnership with the private industry in a way that was supposed to make things much more effective, much more economical,” he said. “But unfortunately, it was in the execution and the monitoring and the auditing we fell behind, we fell short.

While the private prison industry is raking in billions for the corporations in charge, the system doesn’t appear to save the government much money, the Times reports:

Studies suggest that governments save little money, if any, by turning over prison functions to private outfits. And in 2016, under President Barack Obama, the Justice Department concluded that private prisons were in general more violent than government-operated institutions, and ordered a phaseout of their use at the federal level. Reversing that order was one of the first things that President Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, did on taking office.

The companies claim they are in fact more efficient than the government. Rodney King, CoreCivic’s public affairs manager, told the Times, “Privately operated facilities are better equipped to handle changes in the flow of illegal immigration because they can open or close new facilities as needed.”

Corporations like CoreCivic and GEO Group have extensive financial and political connections, spending millions on lobbying Congress to ensure they maintain their power.

Read the entire article, and watch the video, here.

Have Republican Voters No Decency at All?

What in the world is wrong with self-identified Republicans in the United States? I mean, look, I’m a historian and a world traveler. I get that different people have different ways of looking at the world, different norms and customs. It is to be expected.

But the blatant amorality of GOP voters, at least as they represent themselves in the polling, baffles me. Morality ought to be equally distributed across parties, like immorality. People are people.

But as Newsweek notes, an Economist/YouGov poll has found that 55 percent of Republicans hold that even if Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted a woman when he was in high school, that would not disqualify him from serving on the Supreme Court.

Note well: They didn’t ask them if they disbelieved the charges and therefore didn’t think he was disqualified.

The question was, if he were actually guilty, should he serve? And a majority of Republicans said he should not be disqualified for this reason. Another 18 percent said they just didn’t know whether it was disqualifying. Really? Attempted rape shouldn’t keep you off the court?

Seventy-one percent of Democrats said that sexual assault is disqualifying. Are they more capable of ethical reasoning, or are they just being partisan and hoping the Democrats can keep a 5-4 majority on the court, which Kavanaugh would permanently throw out?

Lawrence Kohlberg, influenced by the Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget, put forward a six-stage structural theory of children’s morality.

Stage 1. Obedience and Punishment Orientation.

Stage 2. Individualism and Exchange.

Stage 3. Good Interpersonal Relationships.

Stage 4. Maintaining the Social Order.

Stage 5. Social Contract and Individual Rights.

Stage 6: Universal Principles.

In stage one, children think something is wrong if there is a significant chance you will be punished for doing it. I think the corollary is that if the likelihood of punishment is remote, at this stage of ethics, a stage-one child might do something more mature individuals would consider wrong, just because they are sure they can get away with it.

In stage two, they still think and act as isolated individuals, but they can understand that there are differing definitions of what is wrong. Some in this school would say that at level two, a person is willing to help out a buddy by doing something generally considered wrong, but no one else—assuming the buddy is willing to scratch the first person’s back in return.

In stage three, teens learn to put the welfare of another person, say a family member or close friend, above individual greed. They might agree that it would be moral to steal an unfairly high-priced medicine for the sake of an ill loved one.

In stage four, the teen comes to value an orderly society, and sees morality as doing what is necessary to uphold that web of relationships. Nationalists among older adults are often stuck at this stage. They value their own society and its norms and stability so much that they are willing to sacrifice the welfare of outsiders for its sake. The Soviet Union was full of people who thought like this about morality.

Persons at stage five put rights above an orderly society. They emphasize rule-based decision-making, not solidarity and orderliness. But like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, they would accept the outcome of the general will if it operated in a procedurally just way.

People at stage six have been castigated as ethical cowboys. They see general ethical principles that are higher than procedural justice. Stage-six ethical thinkers insist on universal, consistent rights. Kohlberg saw Gandhi and Martin Luther King in this light.

I’m not a psychologist or anything, but I went through a phase when I read a lot of Kohlberg and his school. I would say that Brett Kavanaugh comes very low on this scale. He likely lied repeatedly—about the legal drinking age when he was 17 (it was 21); about what the sexually charged terms in his yearbook meant (“devil’s triangle” is a menage-a-trois, or three positions in one night; “bouf” is anal intercourse); about not being a fall-down drunk, which some of those close to him say he was. It also seems to me that he told all these lies because he knows that the Republican majority in the Senate will vote for him no matter what, and therefore he risks no punishment from lying. He has the moral sense of a kindergartner.

As for putting an alleged sexual predator on the court, the majority of Republicans who hold that it should be done may be functioning at level two (they’ll do a favor for Kavanaugh if he’ll rule for their interests—low taxes, low services for everyone but the well-off, curbs on workers and minorities and an end to abortion). That would be level two. Or those who think it is necessary to put him on the bench to preserve social order might be reasoning as high as level four.

But no level five would say, “Put someone guilty of sexual assault on the Supreme Court,” since that would contravene general moral principles and basic fairness.

As for level six, people of that sort—who I wouldn’t imagine are more than 5 percent of the population—might even lead a movement against putting attempted rapists on the Supreme Court. Of course, some Democrats who supported such a movement might only be doing it out of concern for social order and social solidarity (level four).

We see this low level of Republican ethical reasoning in lots of areas, from approval for Donald Trump despite his own immorality to Republicans’ willingness to treat Muslims in unfair and even unconstitutional ways.

So I am genuinely shocked by this poll’s results, and can’t figure out what produces them. Has the Republican Party just started attracting ethically challenged individuals, so that it is mostly fours and below?

I recognized that not all the 71 percent among the Dems may be taking this stance on principle. Some of the Democratic opposition to the unethical stances I mentioned above could also be stage four—order and solidarity, rather than higher ethical thinking about principles. Still, across the board, Dems take more principled stances.

Is there some sort of elective affinity here? Democrats become known for compassion, so they attract more ethical people?

It seems to me that social psychologists ought to look into what is wrong with self-described Republican voters that they take such completely amoral stances.